A Wrinkle in Time —
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg Murry, book 1

1962’s
A
Wrinkle in Time
won a Newbery, even though it features no dying dogs or other pets and no child drowns tragically in a beloved creek. A star does
explode but that happens before the book opens. The Newbery and the
book’s heavy-handed Christian imagery gave the work enough of a
patina of respectability that schools would stock it—even though it
was pretty obviously spec-fic. Despite the official imprimatur, kids
liked it enough to actually read it for pleasure. It still has a high
enough profile that the net
abounds in reviews.

Pity
poor Meg Murry:

braces,
glasses [1], mousy brown hair, and mediocre marks. Her mediocrity is
a glaring contrast to her brilliant parents’ scientific
accomplishments and, her twin older brothers’ academic and sports
achievements. She is also less talented than her younger brother
Charles Wallace, who is a brilliant telepathic mutant (though nobody
outside the family knows about Charles [2]). On top of being odd, she
is also a discipline problem for the school administration; they
heartily disapprove of her tendency to pummel kids who slander her family.

Her
father has been away on a trip for a very, very long time and the
town gossips believe that the Murrys have been abandoned. Mrs.
Murry might have become that most scandalous of creatures, a single
mom. Meg does not believe that her father would leave them; she is
worried that something bad might have happened to him. Mrs. Murry
could (if she would) tell her daughter that Meg is right to worry.

The
very very peculiar neighbor, Mrs. Whatsit, and her two odd
companions, Mrs. Who (status of medical degree undetermined) and Mrs.
Which, intervene. While they themselves cannot directly save Mr.
Murry, they know who can, if suitably encouraged: Meg, her brother
Charles Wallace, and the stalwart teen next door, Calvin!

(Meg’s
other brothers, the twins, are not included in this group offer. They
will henceforth vanish from this review.)

The
Mrs. Ws send the trio across higher dimensions to a world of eerie
conformity, where Mr. Murry has been imprisoned by IT, an evil
disembodied brain. IT is stronger even than Charles Wallace. And
since Calvin is essentially baggage, that means it will be up to Meg
to save the day. If she can.

Although
this book fails to deliver the usual Newbery carnage, the dead pets
and drowned childhood pals, there’s certainly enough horror and
suspense to compensate for any other deficits. Any kid reading this
for the first time couldn’t have been sure how many of the trio would
survive to go home to Earth, if indeed any of them would.

~oOo~

L’Engle
is writing in C. S. Lewis mode here (fantasy, despite nods to science
or at least mathematics) so I found it somewhat amusing that the
explanation of travel through higher dimensions could have been
lifted directly from Heinlein’s
Starman
Jones.
Mind you, by that stage in his career, Heinlein wsn’t writing SF
that was much harder than the interplanetary fantasies concocted by Lewis.

The
form evil takes in this novel is enforced conformity. While it would
have been very easy for a reader in 1962 (height of the Cold War) to
see that as an allegory for Those Darn Soviets, what we actually see
could be an American suburb: every home on its quarter acre plot with
the mandatory housewife and a child or two playing in the approved
manner, at the approved time.

(Of
course, if we look back at what kids were actually doing then, they
enjoyed freedoms that would get their parents imprisoned for reckless
endangerment nowadays and might earn the kids a prescription for
behavior-modifying medication as well. Who could have guessed how
safety-crazy society would become? Aside from L’Engle, I mean; she
clearly had some premonition.)

The
book is marked by the unsubtle religiosity that was common at the
time [3]. Not my cup of tea, but not unexpected. What did please me
was the unusual choice of protagonist: Meg Murry, a
girl.
Not only that, she is never pushed out of the spotlight, not by her
mutant brother Charles Wallace (who turns out to be worse than
useless as a rescuer), not by Calvin, who fits the profile of a
standard early 1960s juvenile novel protagonist. Perhaps that’s why
Calvin comes along for the ride: he looks like the character who
steps in at the last moment to save the day, but he actually
isn’t
the character who steps in at the last moment to save the day. How
atypical for 1962.

L’Engle
was a successful and prolific author, but most of her books did not
resonate with me. This novel is one of the few L’Engle books I have
ever reread [4], and the only one I own. Later books continued the
story of the Murry family (although I think the interstellar
exploration angle got dropped, never to be mentioned again). My
unreliable memory tells me that it was Calvin who became a noted
academic, while Meg covertly provided mathematical assistance while
hiding behind the façade of an unremarkable housewife. In this book,
however, Meg starts out at center stage and she remains there.

1:
You may ask “Did the movie adaptation give us a mousy, unattractive
Meg?” That sound you hear is my bitter laughter.

2:
The townsfolk think Charles Wallace is a moron. This was an age when
not only were people free with the m-word, it was one where being
related to someone who was mentally handicapped carried a taint. Just
ask Rose Mary Kennedy.

3:
I recently listened to a dreadful 1960s radio adaptation of James
Blish’s “Surface Tension,” into which many portentous references
to “the Creator” had been shoveled. The original is about a bold
adaptation to a hostile world. The adaptation is about relying on
higher powers to save people from otherwise inescapable doom.

4:
I may have reread
The
Arm of the Starfish
;
I’m not sure.
I
vaguely remember a tepid Bad Girl, an antagonist who looked a bit
like a spider, something about regeneration, and possibly a shark.